My mission: Find technology for Early Adopters. Follow me: on Twitter @danwoodsearly on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/danwoodsearly/ on myBlog @ http://www.CITOResearch.com. I am a CTO, writer, and consultant. For tech vendors, I help explain their technology. For users, I help find, select, and deploy new solutions that have explosive business value. I love to speak and share ideas.

Eight Rules for Building and Perfecting Mobile Apps

At many companies, the thrill of that first mobile app is over. The rush of excitement about creating an app for an event, a marketing program, or a business process has come and gone. Often, the app showed promise, but didn’t work exactly as imagined. Sometimes the app worked right, but nobody used it. Other times, everything went disappointingly wrong. Isn’t technology wonderful?

The important thing is to learn from your experience and figure out the role mobile apps will play in your company’s future. It doesn’t matter if you used apps for marketing, productivity, or to support partnerships. The decision to create an app is not just about solving one problem. Mobility is really a continuing program for addressing many needs over multiple years, typically with multiple apps.

Companies that are serious about mobility quickly realize that apps must be supported by marketing, tracked through analytics, improved through user experience techniques, secured from attack, and managed using a new generation of technology. It is the big wins along with steady improvement from the use of apps that justifies this level of effort.

In order to get perspective for those who see mobile strategy as a journey, I sat down with Xtreme Labs’ Farhan Thawar, VP of Engineering, and Imtiaz Jaffer, Head of Marketing to capture their advice about how to help mobility drive business results. Xtreme Labs was founded in 2007 and has helped a wide variety of clients learn how their businesses can leverage mobile products.

When it comes to building successful mobile products, Xtreme Labs outlines three stages (Discovery, Product, and Performance) and eight rules for running a successful mobile app program. These rules were extracted from an in-depth interview about the Xtreme Labs process that can be found on CITOResearch.com.

The Discovery Stage

In the Discovery stage, you answer important questions about what you want your mobile app to do.

Rule: Create a lifecycle for engagement

Mobile is not a short-term fad; it’s a permanent shift. It is important to treat it that way and to create an internal capability to make the best use of mobility.

“I would say the biggest mistake is thinking too short term, saying, ‘We need a mobile presence’ without having an end-to-end idea of what you’re trying to accomplish in mobile from a business perspective. They say, ‘Oh, we just need an app’, said Thawar. “They hire somebody from Craigslist, put an app into the App Store and then say, ‘We’re done. Check the box.’ That’s the biggest mistake. People take a short-term view.”

Rule: Support mobile friendly scenarios

Resist the temptation to shoehorn your website onto a mobile device. You must choose to support activities that are appropriate for the context people will be in when using the app.

“Don’t just convert the desktop to mobile. Don’t say ‘We’ve got 37 things you can do on the website. You should be able to do those 37 things on your mobile device.’ That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do.” said Thawar. “We’re saying, ‘What are the key scenarios? If customers are waiting at the bus stop, are there some things they can do very quickly to accomplish something with your brand? That’s much different from, ‘Hey, I’m on the desktop and I want to refinance my mortgage.’ You’re probably not going to do that on your mobile phone while you’re waiting in line for coffee.”

Rule: Set a clear business goal

Almost every company is seeing a significant rise in traffic from mobile devices. Naturally, there is an urge to do something for mobile users. But whatever you do for users must also do something to help your business.

“The whole idea behind discovery is not just to answer questions about what is possible in mobility, but to find the right things to do and then determine whether there is a business case to do them,” said Thawar.

Rule: Develop metrics to track progress

There are so many metrics to track a mobile application that it can be a distraction. The best policy is to set business metrics for increased revenue, more leads, and so on. Supplement these with diagnostic metrics such as number of downloads, repeat usage, social sharing, user reviews, and mentions in the press to help make the app more effective.

“Sometimes business goals get lost in the flurry of statistics about an app,” said Jaffer. “On the other hand, brands aren’t aware of what’s available to them by way of metrics to track in the first place. It’s important to establish a clear set of goals and understand what you can and can’t track. That way, by the time you’ve launched, the focus is on measurement and optimization.”

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I just bookmarked this article and sent to some of my clients. It is very good however there as a few things I would like to add. As a mobile developer we see allot of businesses in various stages of creating a mobile app.

Prior to creating a mobile app one thing that should be determined is if this app is something to facilitate a process or is to be something to stand on its own. For example, a business that sells custom furniture would/could need to determine if the app will be this be catalog type of app that showcases current products and allows people to make a payment, or maybe a app that allows to completely design custom furniture from scratch. One type would only really facilitate your product sales where as the other could allow for potential customers to go to a competitor. However this should not scare you as a good app can be a great tool to expand and grow your business, after all Fab saw over 50% of there sales come from there mobile app on Christmas.

The other point is app discovery, it is very important that app shows up when it is searched for. A huge problem many companies face is they hire developers that do not how to SEO a mobile app for app stores which causes huge problems when people can not find a app they are looking for even when searching for it by its name.

No matter what a business does it always important though that they keep in mind a simple truth, make sure whatever app your providing to your customers adds a unique value to someone using it.